Cups to Grams Converter

Every conversion on this page runs through a single number for each ingredient: its density, expressed as grams per US cup. Multiply cups by that density and you get grams. Divide grams by that density and you get cups. Millilitres, tablespoons, teaspoons, ounces, and pounds all route through the same pivot, so switching units never changes the underlying weight — only how it's displayed.

Why weighing beats measuring by volume

Volume measurements assume every cup of an ingredient behaves the same way. In a real kitchen, they don't. A cup measures a fixed amount of space; the number of grams that fits inside depends on how tightly the ingredient packs, how humid the room is, whether the ingredient has been sifted, scooped, spooned, or dumped, and even how the cup is levelled. Weighing sidesteps all of that. A gram of flour is a gram of flour whether you scooped it, sifted it, or poured it — and your scale doesn't care what the weather is doing.

Professional bakeries weigh almost everything for exactly this reason. Consistency is a competitive advantage: a bakery that hits the same crumb, colour, and rise every day is a bakery that keeps customers. The same principle applies at home. The difference between a chewy cookie and a puddle is often twenty grams of flour, and twenty grams of flour is easy to lose in a badly-measured cup. If you take one habit from this page, let it be that: buy a small digital scale, tare it, and stop arguing with your measuring cups.

Scooping method changes flour weight by up to 20%

Flour is the classic offender. King Arthur Baking lists all-purpose flour at 120 grams per cup when you spoon flour lightly into the cup and level off the top with a straight edge. Dip a dry-measure cup directly into the bag and shake off the excess, and you'll pack in closer to 140 or even 150 grams — a 15 to 20 percent overshoot. Some cooks compact it further by tapping the cup on the counter to settle the flour and then adding more; that pushes past 160 grams per cup, which is one and a third times the intended amount.

The result is tough cookies, dry cakes, dense bread, and rubbery muffins — none of which are the recipe author's fault. This is why professional recipe writers who care about reproducibility give weights alongside volumes. If a recipe you love only gives you cups, run it through this converter once, note the gram weights in the margin, and never scoop-and-shake again.

Brown sugar has a related but opposite problem: recipes almost always call for it "packed", meaning pressed firmly into the cup until it holds the cup's shape when turned out. Unpacked brown sugar weighs about 145 grams per cup; packed weighs around 213 grams — a difference of nearly 50 percent. Cocoa powder, powdered sugar, and shredded coconut are similar. When in doubt, weigh.

US, UK, metric, and Australian cups aren't the same

The "cup" is a customary unit, and different countries have standardised it differently:

• US customary cup — 236.588 ml. This is what American cookbooks and this converter use by default.
• US legal cup — 240 ml. Used on nutrition labels in the US. About 1.4% larger than the customary cup.
• Metric cup — 250 ml. Used in the UK for modern recipes, in Australia, New Zealand, and much of Europe. About 5.6% larger than the US customary cup.
• UK imperial cup — 284 ml (half an imperial pint). Rarely used in modern British recipes, which have largely moved to grams, millilitres, or the metric 250 ml cup, but it does show up in older cookbooks.

The practical upshot: a US recipe that calls for 2 cups of flour means about 240 grams, while an Australian recipe calling for 2 metric cups means about 250 grams. The gap grows with the quantity. When cooking from a foreign cookbook, weigh whenever the recipe gives you grams too, and only convert cups when you have no other choice. This converter is calibrated to the US customary cup; Australian and UK metric cups run roughly 5–6% heavier for the same ingredient.

A note on rounding

Densities in the table are rounded to the nearest gram per cup, which is more precise than most home scales can measure anyway. The output of the calculator shows two decimal places for small quantities and no decimals for large ones, because grinding out "126.4 g" of flour on a scale that measures to the gram is theatre, not baking. Weigh to the gram, trust the density, and move on.